September 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

We're in Spain today, with three groups who interpret Ibérica's oldest musical traditions in wonderful ways...

Above, "María Ramo de Palma / La Zorra" and "El Vapor" by Coetus, from Barcelona, filmed last year for the Concert Privats series. This Spanish percussion orchestra specializes in instruments that are "little or not known at all, which over time
have been used to accompany songs, ballads, processions, festivals and
dances in the Iberian Peninsula (tambourines, rods,
jars, mortars, pans, drums, kettledrums, rustic drums, etc.), creating a
proprietary and innovative language inspired by traditional rhythms and
dialogues with the voice."

Below, "La cantiga del fuego," a Sephardic song performed by Ana Alcaide and her band in Huesca (in the north-east of the country). Alcaide is a musican, composer, and music historian from Madrid, now based in Toledo. FolkWorld describes her work as "a fusion between the Nordic sonorities of the nyckelharpa (Swedish keyed
fiddle), the Sephardic (Spanish-Jewish) music, and the traditional
sounds from several places around the Mediterranean Sea." For more information, there's a good interview with Alcaide here.

And third, on a somewhat different note:

"Nueva vida" by Ojos de Brujo, from Barcelona, whose thoroughly addictive music combines flamenco and gyspy jazz with hiphop. The last time they appeared on this blog was back in 2010, and that's way too long.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet
made dark tracks on the hearth.Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat,
but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold.
The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor.
She sat there with a silvered cedar knot
for a low stool; and I sat opposite,
my lips and eyelids hot
in the heat of the fire. Piling on dry bark,
seeing that no steam went up from her dark dress,
I felt uneasiness
as though firm sand had shifted under my feet
in the wash of a wave.

I brought her soup from the stove and she would not eat,
but sat there crying her cold tears,
her blue lips quivering with cold and grief.
She blamed me for a thief,
saying that I had burned a piece of wood
the tide washed up. And I said, No,
the tide had washed it out again; and even so,
a piece of sodden wood was not so rare
as polished agate stones or ambergris.

She stood and wrung her hair
so that the water made a sudden splash
on the round rug by the door. I saw her go
across the little footbridge to the beach.
After, I threw the knot on the hot coals.
It fell apart and burned with a white flash,
a crackling roar in the chimney and dark smoke.
I beat it out with a poker
in the soft ash.

Now I am frightened on the shore at night,and all the phosphorescent swells that rise
come towards me with the threat of her dark eyes
with a cold firelight in them;
and crooked driftwood writhes
in dry sand when I pass.

Should she return and bring her sisters with her,
the withdrawing tide
would leave a long pool in my bed.
There would be nothing more of me this side
the melting foamline of the latest wave.

The images above: two paintings for "Undine" by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), and two drawings by Alan Lee.Barnard's poem, based on ondine/undine folklore, comes from the 1935 issue of Poetry magazine; all rights reserved by the Barnard estate.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Birds have been creatures of the mythic imagination since the very earliest times. Various birds, from eagles to starlings, serve as messengers to the gods in stories the world over, carrying
blessings to humankind and prayers up to the heavens. They lead shamans into the Spirit World and dead souls to the Realm Beyond; they follow heroes
on quests, uncover secrets, give warning and shrewd council.

The movements,
cries and migratory patterns of birds have been studied as oracles. In Celtic
lands, ravens were domesticated as divinatory birds, although eagles, geese
and the humble wren also had their prophetic powers. In Norse myth, the two ravens
of Odin flew throughout the world each dawn, then perched on the raven-god's
shoulder to whisper news into his ears. A dove with the power of human speech
sat in the branches of the sacred oak grove at Zeus's oracle at Dodona;
a woodpecker was the oracular bird in groves sacred to Mars.

According to various Siberian tribes, the
eagle was the very first shaman, sent to humankind by the gods to heal sickness
and suffering. Frustrated that human beings could not understand its speech
or ways, the bird mated with a human woman, and she soon gave birth to a
child from whom all shamans are now descended. In a mystic cloak of bird
feathers, the shaman chants, drums and prays him- or herself into a trance.
The soul takes flight, soaring into the spirit world beyond our everyday
perception. (Great care must be taken in this exercise, lest the wing-borne
soul forgets its way back home.)

Likewise, the shamans of Finland call upon
their eagle ancestors to lead them into the spirit realms and bring them
safely back again. Shamans, like eagles, are blessed (or cursed) with the
ability to cross between the human world and the realm of the gods, the
lands of the living and the lands of the dead. Despite the healing powers
this gives them (the "medicine" of their bird ancestry), men and women in
shamanic roles were often seen as frightening figures, half-mad by any ordinary
measure, poised between co-existent worlds, fully present in none. The Buriats
of Siberia traced their lineage back to an eagle and a swan, honoring the
ancestral swan-mother with migration ceremonies each autumn and spring.
To harm a swan, or even mishandle swan feathers, could cause illness or
death; likewise, to harm a woman could bring the wrath of the swans upon
men.

A swan-maiden was the mother of Cuchulain, hero of Ireland's Ulster
cycle, and thus the warrior had a geas (taboo) against killing these sacred
birds. In "The Children of Lir," one of the Three
Great Sorrows of Irish mythology, the four children of the lord of the sea
are transformed into wild
swans by the magic of a jealous step-mother. Neither
Lir himself nor all the great magicians of the Tuatha De Danann can mitigate
the power of the curse, and the four are condemned to spend three hundred
years on Lake Derryvaragh, three hundred years on the Mull of Cantyre, and
a final three hundred years off the stormy coast of Mayo. During this time,
the Children of Lir retain the use of human speech, and the swans are famed
throughout the land for the beauty of their song. The curse is ended when
a princess of the South is wed to Lairgren, king of Connacht in the North.
The swan-shapes fall away at last, but now they resume their human shapes
as four withered and ancient souls. They soon die, and are buried together
in a single grave by the edge of the sea. For many centuries, Irishmen would
not harm a swan because of this sad story -- and country folk still say
that a dying swan sings a song of eerie beauty, recalling the music of the
Children of Lir...and echoing the ancient Greek belief that a swan sings
sweetly once in a lifetime (ie: a "swan song"), in the moments before it
dies. (More swan tales can be found here and here.)

The Tuatha De Danaan, the fairy race of old Ireland, were known to appear
in the shape of white birds, their necks adorned with gold and silver chains;
alternately,
they also took human shape, wearing magical
cloaks of feathers.
The Celtic
islands of immortality had orchards thick with birds and bees,
where beautiful
fairy women lived in houses thatched with bright bird feathers.

Crows and ravens are also birds omnipresent
in myth and folklore. The crow, commonly portrayed as a trickster or thief,
was considered an ominous portent -- and yet crows were also sacred to Apollo
in Graeco-Roman myth; to Varuna, guardian of the sacred order in Vedic myth;
and to Amaterasu Omikami, the sun-goddess of old Japan. The ancestral spirits
of the Maratha in India resided in crows; in Egypt a pair of crows symbolized
conjugal felicity. In the Aboriginal lore of Australia and the myths of
many North American tribes, Raven appears as a dual-natured Trickster and
Creator God, credited with bringing fire, light, sexuality, song, dance,
and life itself to humankind.

In Celtic lore, the raven belonged to Morrigan,
the Irish war goddess -- as well as to Bran the Blessed in the great Welsh
epic, The
Mabinogion. Tradition has it that Bran's severed head is buried
under the Tower of London. A ceremonial Raven Master still keeps watch over
the birds of the Tower; an old custom says that if Bran's birds ever leave
the Tower, the kingdom will fall.

The owl is a bird credited with more malevolence
than any other, even though its reputation for wisdom goes back to our earliest
myths. In Greece, the owl (sacred to both Athena and Demeter) was revered
as a prescient creature -- yet also feared, for its call or sudden appearance
could foretell a death. Lilith, Adam's wife before Eve (banished for her
lack of submissiveness) was associated with owls and depicted with wings
or taloned feet.

In the Middle East, evil spirits took the shape of owls
to steal children away -- while in Siberia, tamed owls were kept in the
house as protectors of children. In Africa, sorcerers in the shape of owls
caused mischief in
the night. To the Ainu of Japan, the owl was an unlucky
creature -- except for the Eagle Owl, revered as a mediator between humans
and the gods. In North America, the symbolism of the owl varied among indigenous
tribes. The Pueblo peoples considered them baleful; the Navajo believed
them to be the restless, dangerous ghosts of the dead. The Pawnee and Menominee,
on the other hand, related to them as protective spirits, and Tohono O'Odham
medicine singers used their feathers in healing ceremonies. When we turn
to Celtic traditions we find that the owl, though sacred, is an ill omen,
prophesying death, illness or the loss of a woman's honor. In the Fourth
Branch of The Mabinogion, the magician Gwydion takes revenge upon Blodeuwedd
(the girl he made out of flowers, who married and then betrayed his son)
by turning her into an owl and setting her loose into the world. (I highly
recommend two novels inspired by this fascinating myth:Owl
Service by Alan Garner and The
Island of the Mighty by Evangeline Walton.)

The crane is another bird associated with
death in the British Isles. It was one of the shapes assumed by the King
of Annwn, the Celtic underworld. To the druids, cranes were portents of
treachery, war, evil deeds and evil women...yet the bird enjoyed a better
reputation in other lands. It was sacred to Apollo -- a messenger and a
honored herald of the spring. The pure white cranes in Chinese lore inhabited
the Isles of the Blest, representing immortality, prosperity, and happiness.
In Japan, the crane was associated with Jorojin, a god of longevity and
luck. In the folktales of Russia, Sicily, India and other cultures the crane
was the "animal guide" who led the hero on his adventures; and tales about cranes who marry human men can be found throughout the far East.

In Celtic lore, the magpie was a bird associated
with fairy revels; with the spread of Christianity, however, this changed
to a connection with witches and devils. In Scandinavia, magpies were said
to be sorcerers flying to unholy gatherings, and yet the nesting magpie
was once considered a sign of luck in those countries. In old Norse myth,
Skadi (the daughter of a giant) was priestess of the magpie clan; the black
and white markings of the bird represented sexual union, as well as male
and female energies kept in perfect balance. In China the magpie was the
Bird of Joy, and two magpies symbolized marital bliss; in Rome, magpies
were sacred to Bacchus and a symbol of sensual pleasure. In England, the
sighting of magpies is still considered an omen in this common folk rhyme:
"One for sorrow, two for joy; three for a girl, and four for a boy. Five
for silver, six for gold, and seven for a secret that's never been told."

The wren is another "fairy bird": a portent
of fairy encounters, and sometimes a fairy in disguise. The wren was sacred
to Celtic druids, and to the Welsh poet-magician Taliesin, thus it was unlucky
to kill the wren at any time of year except during the ceremonial "Hunting
of the Wren," around the winter solstice. In this curious custom (still
practiced in some rural areas of the British Isles and France), "Wren Boys"
dress in rag-tag costumes, bang on pots, pans and drums, and walk in procession
behind a wren killed and mounted upon a pole decorated with oak leaves and
mistletoe. In some areas, Wren Boys also appear on Michaelmas, 12th Night,
or St. Stephen's Day carrying a live wren from cottage to cottage (in a
small "Wren House" decorated with ribbons), collecting tributes of coins
and mugs of beer wherever they stop. The wren is known as the king of the
birds, an honorific explained in the following story: All the birds held
a parliament and decided that whoever could fly the highest and fastest
would be crowned king. The eagle easily outdistanced the others, but the
clever wren hid under his wing until the eagle faltered -- then the wren
jumped out and flew higher.

The dove is a bird associated with the Mother
Goddesses of many traditions -- symbolizing light, healing powers, and the
transition from one state of existence to the next. The dove was sacred
to Astarte, Ishtar, Freyja, Brighid, and Aphrodite. The bird also represented
the external soul, separate from the life of the body -- and thus magicians
hid their souls or hearts in the shape of doves. Doves give guidance in
fairy tales, where (in contrast with their usual gentle image) they show
a marked penchant for bloody retribution. White doves light upon the tree
Cinderella has planted upon her mother's grave, transforming rags to riches
so she can go to the prince's ball. These are the birds who warn the prince
of "blood in the shoe!" when the stepsisters try to fit into the delicate
slipper by hacking off their heels and toes. The birds eventually blind
the treacherous sisters, pecking out their eyes. Murdered children
in several fairy tales reappear as snow-white doves, hovering around the
family home until vengeance
is finally served. Likewise, the white dove in the Scots Border ballad "The
Famous Flower of Serving Men" is also a human soul in limbo: a knight cruelly murdered
by his mother-in-law. He flies through the forest shedding blood-red tears
and telling his story. The woman is eventually burned. (See Delia Sherman's
Through
a Brazen Mirror and Ellen Kushner's Thomas
the Rhymer for literary adaptations of this tale.)

The mysterious song of the nightingale has
also inspired several classic tales; most famously: "The Nightingale" by
Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen and the tragic story of "The Nightingale and the Rose" by England's Oscar Wilde. (I recommend Kara Dalkey's lyrical
novel The
Nightingale, based on the former.)

Geese were holy, protected birds in many ancient
societies. In Egypt, the great Nile Goose created the world by laying the
cosmic egg from which the sun was hatched. The goose was sacred to Isis,
Osiris, Horus, Hera, and Aphrodite. In India, the goose -- a solar
symbol -- drew the chariot of Vishnu; the wild goose, a vehicle of Brahma,
represented the creative principal, learning and eloquence. In Tibet, gooseheaded women can be found among the dakini, which are volatile female spirits that aid or hinder one's spiritual journey. In Siberia,
the goddess Toman shook feathers from her sleeve each spring. They turned
into geese, carefully tended and observed by Siberian shamans. Freyja, the
goddess of northern Europe who travels the land in a chariot drawn by cats,
is sometimes pictured with only one human foot and one foot of a goose or
swan -- an image with shamanic significance in various traditions. Berchta,
the fierce German goddess (or witch) associated with the Wild Hunt, is also
pictured with a single goose foot as she rides upon the backs of storms.
Caesar tells us that geese were sacred in Britain, and thus taboo as food
-- a custom still existent in certain Gaelic areas today. Goose-girls, talking
geese, and the goose who lays golden eggs are all standard ingredients in
the folk tales ("Mother Goose" tales) of Europe. The phrase "silly as a
goose" is recent; Ovid called them "wiser than the dog."

The stork is another Goddess
bird -- sacred to Hera and nursing mothers, which may be why it appears
in folklore carrying newborn babies to earth. The pelican is symbolic of
women's faith, sacrifice, and maternal devotion -- due to the belief that
it feeds its young on the blood of its own breast. Kites and gulls are the
souls of dead fisherman returned to haunt the shores -- a tradition limited
to the men of the sea, not their daughters or wives. "The women don't come
back no more," explained one old English fisherman to folklorist Edward
Armstrong. "They've seen trouble enough." The lark, the linnet, the robin,
the loon...they, too, have engendered tales of their own, winging their way
between heaven and earth in sacred stories, folktales, fairy tales, old rhymes and folkways from around the globe.

The following prayer comes from the Highlands of Scotland, recorded (in Gaelic) more than one hundred years ago:

Power of raven be yours, Power of eagle be yours, Power of the Fiann.
Power of storm be yours, Power of moon be yours, Power of sun. Power of sea be yours, Power of land be yours, Power of heaven. Goodness of sea
be yours, Goodness of earth be yours, Goodness of heaven. Each day be
joyous to you, No day be grievous to you, Honor and compassion. Love of
each face be yours, Death on pillow be yours, And God be with you.

“I pray to the birds," says Terry Tempest Williams (in her gorgeous book Refuge) "because they remind me of what I love rather
than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”

For
more bird lore, I recommend: Secret Language of Birds by Adele Nozedar, The
Language of the Birds edited by David M. Guss, The Healing Wisdom of
Birds by Lesley Morrison, The Folklore of Birds by Edward A. Armstrong,
and Birds
in Legend, Fable and Folklore by E. Ingersoll.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

“I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective.” - Madeleine L'Engle (The Summer of the Great-Grandmother)

Admit that once you have got upfrom your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary, you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story...

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

A quiet morning. The sky has cleared at last and Tilly is filled with joy. After a week of illness, she's well again and our morning walks through the hills resume.

But wait. What's this? Behind her, something is crashing and splashing through the undergrowth, moving up the stream bed in the shadow of the trees.

A friend? A foe? A monster? Tilly stands alert. Will barking be required?

Ah, but it's only a shy young calf, as surprised by us as we are by her.

Tilly throws me a glance over her shoulder, tail wagging briskly. A friend! What fun!

She trots up the stony bank eagerly...

...and then backs up fast, for the calf is not alone.

A whole herd of cows is climbing upstream, scrambling up the rocks of the waterfall like enormous mountain goats, pushed up the slope by a big black bull. He is moving them from one field to another...and we are in the way.

We run the entire length of the field, the cows and the bull bellowing behind...and flop in the grass by the field's rusty gate, hearts racing and grinning like fools. I settle back against an ancient oak, my book in hand, fresh coffee in my cup. Tilly sits close, ears cocked, alert and on guard. Just in case there are any more monsters.

She's perfectly happy. The cows and the bull had startled her, astonished her, and perhaps even frightened her a little, but it was all part of a good morning's adventure. (She'll be hoping for cows in the waterfall now when we walk this way again.)

I'd like to be more like Tilly myself, when life throws up unexpected things and bulls emerge to block the path ahead. Far better to be astonished than anxious; far better to move in new directions than stand there frozen by dismay. As Mary Oliver says in her exquisite poem titled "When Death Comes":

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms....

I want to say that I walked through life with rapt attention, like the eager, clear-eyed little creature at my side.

I'm reminded of these words from graphic designer Milton Glaser on value of astonishment:

"If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment -- and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never fully learn it."

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

"Libraries are the best literacy resource we have," says Malorie Blackman (the current Children's Laureate of Great Britain) in a recent article penned for The Guardian. "For children they provide an equaliser that allows everyone access to books, story-telling sessions, homework clubs; expert librarians who give non-partisan assistance and advice regarding books; and warm and safe environments within which to discover and explore the world of literature. Libraries switch children on to a love of reading, with all the ensuing benefits, and can make them lifelong readers. Without them, literacy may increasingly become the province of the lucky few, rather than the birthright of everyone."

"Libraries," as Rebecca Solnit describes them, "are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds."

'A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful," Vicki Myron points out. "It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.''

"Libraries are a force for good," says Libba Bray. "They wear capes. They fight evil. They don’t get upset when you don’t send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you’re late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of all human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn’t allow that torch to be extinguished."

Thinking about libraries, I'm reminded of this lovely passage from Sarah Smith's Chasing Shakespeare: "I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation."

Amen.

And yet libraries are now closing at a horrifying rate....and this will only get worse if we don't take immediate action in the UK, the US, and around the world. (Follow the links to organizations fighting the good fight.)

"Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism," says Neil Gaiman.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Today: The Proclaimers (those two irresistible Scottish lads) on the road to Vegas for their song "Let's Get Married." This one's for Howard, because it's our wedding anniversary today and this is a song we listened to at least a million times back when we did the scary deed of tying the knot and officially becoming a family.

Does every couple have songs that makes each think of the other? The one that never fails to make me think of my husband is Dougie MacLean's "This Love Will Carry," particularly after the things we've weathered as a family in the last few years. It's not a sweet song, but one about going through the dark of the woods together...for don't we all make that fairy tale journey at some point (or several points) in our lives? When we can do it hand in hand, that's a blessing indeed. In his performance below, MacLean (also from Scotland) is joined by the wonderful Appalachian American singer and musician Kathy Mattea. It is one of the most beautiful songs I know.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

According to one old legend, cats were the
only creatures on earth who were not made by God at the time of Creation.
When God covered the world with water, and Noah set his ark afloat, the
ark became infested with rats eating up the stores of food. Noah prayed
for a miracle, and a pair of cats sprang to life from the mouths of the
lion and lioness. They set to work, and quickly dispatched all the rats
— but for the original two. As their reward, when the boat reached dry
land the cats walked at the head of the great procession of Noah's animals.
Which is why, the legend concludes, all cats are proud, to this very day.

William Butler Yeats

George Bernard Shaw

In the earliest feline images found on cave
walls and carved out of stone, wildcats are companions and guardians to
the Great Goddess — often flanking a mother goddess figure in the act
of giving birth. Such imagery has been found in ancient sites across Europe,
Africa, India and the Middle East. In China the lion, Shih, is one of
the four principal animal protectors — associated with rain, guardian
of the dead and their living descendants. In the New World, evidence of
wildcat cults is found across Central and South America, where the jaguar
was the familiar of shamans and a powerful totemic animal. Ai apaec of
the Mochica people of Peru was a much-revered feline god, pictured in
the shape of a wrinkle-faced old man with long fangs and cat whiskers.
A hauntingly beautiful wood carving of a kneeling figure with the head
of a cat was found just off the Florida coast — remarkably well preserved,
the image dates back over three thousand years.

Gustav Klimt and Katze

Colette

We find the first evidence of the wildcat's
small cousin, Felis catus, in ancient Egypt — where the beasts were so
sacred that any man who killed one was condemned to death. When a house
cat died, the entire family shaved its eyebrows as a sign of grief; and
mummified cats (along with tiny mummified mice) have been found in Egyptian
tombs. In the 1st century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus reported the
fate of a hapless Roman who'd caused the death of a cat:

"The populace
crowded to the house of the Roman who had committed the 'murder'; and
neither the efforts of the magistrates sent by the King to protect him
nor the universal fear inspired by the might of Rome could avail to save
the man's life, though what he had done was admitted to be accidental.
This is not an incident which I report from hearsay, but something I saw
myself during my sojourn in Egypt."

Jean Cocteau

Matisse and Miouche

Mau was the Egyptian word for cat
— both an imitation of its speech, and a mother-syllable. Bast, the Cat-mother,
was a goddess whose cult began in the delta city of Bubastis and eventually
covered all of Egypt with the rise of the XXII Dynasty. Unlike the fierce
lion-headed Sekmet from earlier Egyptian myth, Bast embodied the benevolent
aspects of cats: fertility, sexuality, love and life-giving heat. Bronzes
from the period show the goddess in her feline form (seated and wearing
earrings), as well as in human form with the head of a cat, kittens at
her feet. The twice-annual Festivals of Bast, as described by Herodotus,
were carnivals of music, dancing, wine-drinking, love-making and religious
ecstasy — dedicated to Bast in her aspect as Mistress of love and the
sensual pleasures.

Pablo Piccsso

Jean Paul Sartre

Numerous legends tell of human beings who
transform into the shape of a cat. Although some male wizards, magicians
and shamans were gifted with this power, more commonly the shapeshifter
was a woman, and a witch. Cats (along with bats, owls and toads) were
believed to be witches' companions who aided in spells and carried messages to the Devil. During the tragically widespread witch trials of 16th and 17th century Europe, feline "familiars" were burned, hung, and drowned alongside their mistresses. A witch, it was said, could
shape-shift into cat form whenever the moon was full. Good men were advised
to lay consecrated salt on their doorstep, lest witches compel
them to join in their revels.

Doris Lessing

Randall Jarrell

When we turn from folklore to fairy tales, shape-shifting
cats are viewed as less sinister creatures. In "The White Cat," a popular French fairy tale by Madame
d'Aulnoy, the three sons of a king are sent upon a series
of quests. The youngest son meets a lovely white cat, the queen of an
enchanted castle filled with cat-servants and courtiers. She helps the
prince with his tasks, and over time he falls in love with her. In the
end, she asks him to cut off her head; sadly, the young prince obeys her
command. This breaks the spell, and the cat assumes her true shape as
a human princess. (For a thoroughly modern rendition of the tale, I recommend Holly Black's YA novel, The White Cat.)

In "Kip the Enchanted Cat," from Russia, a mother cat
and her kitten are actually human beings under a fairy's curse. The
kitten is raised with a human princess and eventually aids her with several
magical tasks, leading to the spell's undoing and
a double wedding with two suitable princes. (This tale — about women's
friendships — was a particular favorite of mine as a child.)

"The Cat
Bride" is a story of animal-transformation in reverse: a house cat becomes
the human bride of a good and gentle man who allows the gossip of neighbors
to undermine his marital contentment. (I recommend Jane Yolen's lovely retelling in her story collection Dream Weaver.)

Ernest Hemingway

W.H. Auden

"Silvershod" (from Russia) is the tale of a poor man, a child, her beloved cat Moura, and a mysterious stag who sheds jewels in
the snow. The fairy tale ends oddly, for the jewels bring prosperity but the dear little cat vanishes with the stag. In a bittersweet poem inspired by the fairy tale, Ellen Steiber writes:

In the north country
a child wakes in a soft feather bed
and remembers
a red-brown cat
whose nose was cold against her neck.

In the north country
a child sits in a tall, gabled house
and remembers a pale gray stag
with a silver hoof
who gave and took
what was most precious.

William Carlos Williams

William S. Burroughs and Ginger

The best known fairy tale cat of them all, of course, is that clever, bold
rascal called "Puss in Boots." The story as we know it now comes
from the French
version penned by Charles Perrault in the 17th century; in earlier
versions -- such
as those of Straparola and Basile in Italy -- Puss is just as
wily, but
hasn't yet taken to wearing his famous boots. In a Scandinavian
version, "Lord Peter," our plotting Puss is female, and is really a princess under a troll's evil curse --
but in most tales, Puss is a cat, nothing more, albeit a very magical cat. (The bawdiest and best retelling, in my opinion, is Angela Carter's, in The Bloody Chamber.)

Joyce Carol Oates

Edward Gorey

In additional to Puss in Boots and other memorable rogues from folklore and fairy tales, cats stalk through the pages of books beloved by children and adults alike.Who could forget the grinning
Cheshire Cat met by Alice
in Wonderland, or poor hungry Simpkin in Beatrix Potter's The
Tailor of Gloucester? Or Rudyard Kipling's The
Cat Who Walks by Himself, padding his way through the Just So Stories?
Or Edward Lear's The
Owl and the Pussy Cat, setting to sea in their pea-green boat?
Or T.S. Eliot's dashing Growltiger in Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats? Or Mehitabel,
friend to Archy the cockroach, in the poems of Don Marquis? Or the wily cats in Nicholas Stuart Gray's classic children's stories: Grimbold's Other World,
The Stone Cage and Mainly in Moonlight?

Ray Bradbury

Peter Matthiessen

In 1817, the American author Washington Irving paid a visit to
Scottish author and folklorist Sir Walter Scott. The following comes
from Irving's account
of that meeting, published in 1835:

"The evening passed delightfully in
a quaint-looking apartment, half-study, half-drawing room. Scott read
several passages from the old romance of Arthur, with a fine deep sonorous
voice, and a gravity of tone that seemed to me to suit the antiquated,
black-letter volume. It was a treat to hear such a work, read by such
a person, and in such place; and his appearance as he sat reading, in
a large armed chair, with his favorite hound Maida at his feet, and surrounded
by books and relics, and border trophies, would have formed an admirable
and most characteristic picture. While Scott was reading, the sage grimalkin
[Scott's cat] had taken his seat in a chair by the fire, and remained
with fixed eye and grave demeanor, as if listening to the reader. I observed
to Scott that his cat seemed to have a black-letter taste in literature.

"'Ah,' said he, 'these cats are very mysterious
kind of folk. There is always more passing in their minds than we are
aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with witches
and warlocks.' He went on to tell a little story about a gude man who
was returning to his cottage one night, when, in a lonely out-of-the-way
place, he met with a funeral coffin covered with a black velvet pall.
The worthy man, astonished and half frightened at so strange a pageant,
hastened home and told what he had seen to his wife and children. Scarce
had he finished, when a great black cat that sat by the fire raised himself
up, exclaimed, 'Then I am king of the cats!' and vanished up the chimney.
The funeral seen by the gude man was one of the cat dynasty. "'Our grimalkin
here,' added Scott, 'sometimes reminds me of the story, by the airs of
sovereignty which he assumes; and I am apt to treat him with respect from
the idea he may be a great prince incognito, and may some time or other
come to the throne.'"

Haruki Murakami

Alexander McCall Smith

"Authors like cats," said Robertson Davies, "because they are such quiet, loveable, wise creatures. And cats like authors for the same reasons."

Marge Piercy

Holly Black and her hairless cat

To end with: two photos of Howard with my beloved cat Oliver at my old place in Arizona, 2008. I'd found Oliver as a starving kitten on the streets of Boston (in the late 1980s), and he was with me for twenty years -- a tough, fiesty, big-hearted fellow. I still miss him.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Refections on community, literature, and language by Marilynne Robinson (from When I Was a Child I Read Books):

"I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of -- who knows it better than I? -- people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are
profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan
whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I
think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for
imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

"I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle.

"All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of
books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human
conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and
woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

"We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake
for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we
sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely little planet, and this
is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides.

"For example, we make language. A language is a grand collaboration, a collective art form that we begin to master as babes and sucklings, and which we preserve, modify, cull, enlarge as we pass through our lives....

"One of the pleasures of writing is that so often I know that there is
in fact a word that is perfect for the use that I want to put it to, and
when I summon it it comes, though I might not have thought of it for
years. And then I think, somewhere someone was the first person to use
that word. Then how did it make its way into the language, and how did
it retain the specificity that makes it perfect for the present use? Language is profoundly communal, and in the mere fact of speaking, then
writing, a wealth of language grows and thrives among us that has
enabled thought and knowledge in a degree we could never calculate. As
individuals and as a species, we are unthinkable without our
communities.

"I remember once, as a child, walking into a library, looking around at the books, and thinking, I could do that. In fact I didn't do it until I was well into my thirties, but the affinity I felt with books as such preserved in me the secret knowledge that I was a writer when any dispassionate appraisal of my life would have dismissed the notion entirely.

"So I belong to the community of the written word in several ways. First,
books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my
attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great service -- and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice -- a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage.

"Sometimes, when I have spent days in my study dreaming a world while the world itself shines outside my windows, forgetting to call my mother because one of my nonbeings has come up with a thought that interests me, I think, this is a very odd way to spend a life. But I have my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience, who have helped me to my deepest enjoyment of it. Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word: Read. Excellent advice, for a great many reasons, a few of which I have suggested here."

Thursday, September 19, 2013

"There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character he is writing for plot. When he knows his character he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own.

George Meredith

Charles Dickens and Turk

"Words like 'sympathy,' 'empathy,' and 'compassion' are overworked and overcharged -- there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table at a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world.

Beatrix Potter

G.K. Chesterton

"Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate
themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human
presence in its mystery and its distinctiveness.

Helen Keller and Sir Thomas

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

"Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are (1) where it
comes from and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also
crave it is beyond dispute.

Gertrude Stein

Virginia Woolf and Pinka

Frida Khalo

"There is a tendency, considered highly
rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and
procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat
everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous
to what we are and probably best done without. But what we really know
about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and
awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the
living creature to fit the dead shell.

P.G. Wodehouse and Ned

Eugene O'Neill and Blemie

"The advice I give my students is
the same advice that I give myself -- forget definition, forget
assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which
explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this,
though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the
old language and call reality miraculous.

"By my lights, fiction that
does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true."

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

For his book The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane journeyed to Britain's remaining wilderness areas -- including Ranoch Moor, a large stretch of bog and heath to the west of Loch Rannoch in Scotland. His reflections on moorland, and the importance of open space, could easily apply to Dartmoor as well:

"In a land as densely populated as Britain," writes Macfarlane, "openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of distance becomes visible. Openness is rare, but its importance is proportionately great. Living constantly among streets and houses induces a sense of enclosure, of short-range sight. The spaces of moors, seas and mountains counteract this.

"Whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes,
as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degrees to either
side. A region of uninterrupted space is not only a convenient metaphor
for freedom and openness, it can sometimes bring those feelings fiercely
on.

"To experience openness is to understand something of what the American novelist Willa Cather, who was brought up on the Great Plains, called 'the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands.' To love open spaces -- and they have, historically, not been loved -- you have to believe, as Cather did, that beauty might at times be a function of continuous space. You have to believe that such principles might possess their own active expansiveness. Anyone who has been in an empty sea, out of sight of land, on a clear day, will know the deep astonishment of seeing the curvature of the globe: the sea's down-turned edges, its meniscal frown.

"Open space brings to mind something that is difficult to express, but unmistakeable to experience....The influence of spaces such as the moor cannot be measured, but should not for this reason be passed over. 'To recline on a stump of thorn, between afternoon and night,' Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native, 'where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumferance of its glance, and to know everything around and underneath has been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harrassed by the irrepressible New."

In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich, based in the Big Sky country of Wyoming, writes: "The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give
the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly,
light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away
obtuse padding."

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the
remaining wilderness be destroyed," said the American historian and novelist Wallace Stegner (1900-1993)."We simply need that wild country
available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and
look in.”

And indeed we do.

The beautiful Dartmoor photographs above were taken last week by our friend David Thiérrée, when he and five other French mythic artists from Brittany came to walk the moor and visit our community of mythic artists in Chagford. In the photo below (left to right) is Virginie Ropars, Claire Briant, Alice Dufeu, Olivier Villoingt, Yoann Lossel, and David himself. Please follow the links to see their enchanting artwork.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

“I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just
learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing
about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and
he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned
instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who
has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride
diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the
neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that
we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why." - Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek)

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.

"There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary
to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower
and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale
and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the
selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is
necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be
dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you
see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to
know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell
what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from
us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place
of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its
home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling
there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . .
name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all
tales are one." - Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

''To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well." - Ursula K. Le Guin (Gifts)

Monday, September 16, 2013

I've come to the studio feeling sleepy, befuddled, and a little overwhelmed by the demands of the work week ahead -- so I've chosen four tunes about sailors & pirates tunes to liven up the morning, kicking off the week with a jolly hey-ho!

Above: "Ten Thousand Miles Away" from John Boden's band, Bellowhead. Boden lives in rural Sussex, and other band members hail from all over the UK.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

All these fairy tale posts are well and good, but I admit to feeling neglected this week. I am, after all, the Muse of the studio (a role I perform to perfection, I think), yet for all the attention I've had here lately, you'd think I was just a dog.

Ah, but I must be patient. My People are artists, and artists are odd, absent-minded creatures, easily distracted. It is my job, as Muse, to take them in hand when they've strayed too far into imaginary realms...to bring them back to their physical senses, their animal bodies (why do People have so much trouble with this???), to the present moment and the everyday magic of the good smelly world around us.

So I push my cold nose into their hands and give them the stare that means: "Let's go for a walk." (My People cannot resist The Stare.)

"Okay, okay," they say at last, laughing, closing the computer,
putting down the book or paintbrush, and we head for the woods. People,
I've learned, must be walked at least twice a day if they're to stay
happy, healthy, and creative. (Use The Stare if your People resist it.)

I leave you with these words by Lao Tzu, which sums up my life philosophy:

"In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the
simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to
control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely
present.”

People know this. They just need to be reminded. And that's where we come in.

Friday, September 13, 2013

To finish our trio of Sleeping Beauty posts, let's turn to the figure of the Thirteenth Fairy.* This quote comes, once again, from About the Sleeping Beauty by P.L. Travers:

"The
appearance of this lady at the christening is the great
moment of the tale, the hook from which everything hangs. Properly to
understand why this is so, we must turn to Wise Women in general and
their role in the world of men. To begin with, they are not mortal women. They are sisters, rather,
of the Sirens, kin to the Fates and the World Mothers. As such, as
creatures of another dimension, myth and legend have been at pains to
embody them in other than human shape -- the winged female figures of
Homer, the bird-headed women of the Irish tales, the wild women of
ancient Russian with square heads and the wisplike Jinn of the Middle
East...

"[I]t should be remembered that
no Wise Woman or Fairy is herself good or bad; she takes on one aspect
or another according to the laws of the story and the necessity of
events. The powers of these ladies are equivocal. They change with
changing circumstances; they are as swift to take umbrage as they are to
bestow a boon; they curse and bless with equal gusto. Each Wise Woman
is, in fact, an aspect of the Hindu goddess, Kali, who carries in her
multiple hands the powers of good and evil.

"It is clear, then, that the
Thirteenth Wise Woman becomes the Wicked Fairy solely for the purpose
of one particular story. It was by chance that she received no
invitation; it might just as well have been one of her sisters. So,
thrust by circumstances into the role, she acts according to law.

"Up
she rises, obstensibly to avenge an insult but in reality to thrust the
story forward and keep the drama moving. She becomes the necessary
antagonist, placed there to show that whatever is 'other,' opposite and fearful, is as indispensable an instrument of creation as any force for
good. The pulling of the Devas and Asuras in opposite directions in the
Hindu myth and the interaction of the good and the bad Fairies produced
the fairy tale. The Thirteenth Wise Woman stands as guardian of the
threshold, the paradoxical adversary without whose presence no threshold
may be passed.

"This is the role played in so many other stories
by the Wicked Stepmother. The true mother, by her very nature, is bound
to preserve, protect, and comfort; that is why she is so often disposed
of before the story begins. It is the stepmother, her cold heart
unwittingly cooperating with the hero's need, who thrusts the child from
the warm hearth, out from the sheltering walls of home to find his own
true way.

"Powers such as these, at once demonic and divine, are
not to be taken lightly. They give a name to evil, free it, and bring it
into the light. For evil will out, they sharply warn us, no matter how
deeply buried. Down in its dungeon it plots and plans, waiting, like an
unloved child, the day of its revenge. What it needs, like the unloved
child, is to be recognized, not disclaimed; given its place and proper
birthright and allowed to contact and cooperate with its sister
beneficent forces. Only the integration of good and evil and the stern
acceptance of opposites will change the situation and bring about the
condition that is known as Happily Ever After. Without the Wicked Fairy there would have been no story. She, not the heroine, is the goddess in the machine."

Observing the Formalities

by Neil Gaiman

As you know, I wasn’t invited to the Christening. Get over it, you repeat.
But it’s the little formalities that keep the world turning.
My twelve sisters each had
an invitation, engraved, and delivered
By a footman. I thought
perhaps my footman had got lost.

Few invitations reach me
here. People no longer leave visiting cards.And even when they did I
would tell them I was not at home,
Deploring the
unmannerliness of these more recent generations.
They eat with their mouths
open. They interrupt.

Manners are all, and the
formalities. When we lose those
We have lost everything.
Without them, we might as well be dead.
Dull, useless things. The
young should be taught a trade, should hew or spin,
Should know their place
and stick to it. Be seen, not heard. Be hushed.

My youngest sister
invariably is late, and interrupts. I am myself a stickler for
punctuality.
I told her, no good will
come of being late. I told her,
Back when we were still
speaking, when she was still listening. She laughed.
It could be argued that I
should not have turned up uninvited.

But people must be taught
lessons. Without them, none of them will ever learn.
People are dreams and
awkwardness and gawk. They prick their fingers
Bleed and snore and drool.
Politeness is as quiet as a grave,
Unmoving, roses without
thorns. Or white lilies. People have to learn.

Inevitably my sister
turned up late. Punctuality is the politeness of princes,
That, and inviting all
potential godmothers to a Christening.
They said they thought I
was dead. Perhaps I am. I can no longer recall.
Still and all, it was
necessary to observe the formalities.

I would have made her
future so tidy and polite. Eighteen is old enough. More than enough.
After that life gets so
messy. Loves and hearts are such untidy things.
Christenings are raucous
times and loud, and rancorous,
As bad as weddings.
Invitations go astray. We’d argue about precedence and gifts.

They would have invited me
to the funeral.

* There is some diagreement about which
fairy, in the story's cast, should be called the Thirteenth Fairy. For some, the designation belongs to the uninvited, malevolent
fairy who curses the infant princess with death. For others, it's the
very last fairy to bestow her gift, mitigating the wicked fairy's
curse by turning "death" into "sleep." For the purposes of this post, I'm using the former definition.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

"Are there thirteen Wise Women at every christening? I think it very likely. I think, too, that whatever gifts they give are over and above those that life offers. If it is beauty it is of some supplementary kind that is not dependent on fine eyes and a perfect nose, though it may include these features. If it is wealth, it comes from some inner abundance that has no relation to pearls and rubies, though the lucky ones may get these too.

"I shall never know which good lady it was who, at my own christening, gave me the everlasting gift, spotless amid all spotted joys, of love for the fairy tale. It began in me quite early, before there was any separation between myself and the world. Eve's apple had not yet been eaten; every bird had an emperor to sing to and any passing beetle or ant might be a prince in disguise....

"Perhaps we are born knowing the tales, for our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run about in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first hear them is not of surprise but of recognition. Things long unknowingly known have suddenly been remembered. Later, like streams, they run underground. For a while they disappear and we lose them. We are busy, instead, with our personal myth in which the real is turned to dream and the dream becomes the real. Sifting this is a long process. It may perhaps take a lifetime and the few who come around to the tales again are those who are in luck."

There were twelve fairies at the feast. Never
Thirteen. The day the queen gave birth, the king

Sent out twelve messengers on horses,
One to each of us, begging us
To bless her, name her, crown her with our favor.
So we came.

There was a banquet — well, there'd have to be,
With jewelled plates and cups, the usual fee
For fairy-godmothering. My sisters returned
The usual gifts: Beauty. Wit. A lovely voice.
Goodness (of course). Good taste (that was Martha,
Wincing at the jewelled cups, the queen's gown).
Grace. Patience. An ear for music. Dexterity
(To help her learn Princessly skills, as sewing
Dancing, playing the lute). Amiability.
Intelligence.
I meant to give her a long life.
I raised my wand and caught her eyes. They were
Gray and awake. Her cheeks were flushed with pink,
Her hair transparent down. She batted at
My wand and laughed. The court transfixed me
With expectant eyes — the king and queen,
My sisters, ladies, nobles, serving men,
Waiting for my gift. I considered
Her life, her marriage to a prince raised
Blind to the world behind the jewelled cups,
And said, "Sweet child, I give your life to you
To lead as you will, to go or stay, to use
My sisters' gifts, or let them be. Rule
In your own right, consortless and free.
If you choose."

The king raged; the queen wept; my sisters
Stood aghast. Not marry? The kiss of death,
A harsher curse than marriage to a frog,
Or kissing a hedgehog, or serving a witch, or even
Herding geese, since all these led to mating.
As a good fairy, I did what I could; I gave her
A hundred years' sleep, a hedge of briars, a spell
That would sort her suitors, test them for grace,
For patience, for wit and intelligence and good taste,
For amiability and a lovely voice.
A man who would be her mate,
Not her master.

Images above: Two fairies by Edmund Dulac (French, 1882-1953), "Places Were Set for Twelve Fairies" from The Ideal Fairy Tales, artist unknown; "Sleeping Beauty" from The Nursery Picture Book, artist unknown; "Sleeping Beauty" by Margaret Tarrant (English, 1888-1959); "A Spray of Hemlock" by Jessie Marion King (Scottish, 1875-1949); and "The Faery Godmother" by Brian Froud (English, contemporary). The poem is copyright 1999 by Delia Sherman, and has appeared in Silver Birch, Blood Moon (Datlow & Windling, eds.) and The Journal of Mythic Arts.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

In her article on the "Sleeping Beauty" fairy tale, Midori Snyder wrestles with her ambivalent feelings towards its problematic protagonist. Out of all the brave, bold, and clever heroines to be found throughout the fairy tale canon, why (she asks) are we still so intrigued by a princess who swoons and sleeps and awaits a man's rescue? To better understand the story's tenacious hold on our imaginations, she turns to its oldest known variants -- one of which is "The 9th Captain's Tale," from The Book of the 1001 Nights:

"Despite an exotic Eastern setting, it begins with familiar
conflict," Midori writes. "A woman longs for a child and declares, 'Give me a daughter,
even if she can't endure the odor of flax.' Her wish is granted and a
daughter is born. As she grows, the Sultan's son is taken with her
beauty and begins to court her. Then, in a mishap, the girl's hand
touches flax and she falls into a death–like sleep. Her distraught
parents transport her incorruptible body to an elaborate shrine on an
island.
The Sultan's son, still very much in love with her, comes to visit
her shrine. A kiss awakens the sleeping maiden and they have sexual
relations for forty days.

"But the Sultan's son cannot remain on the island indefinitely,
and eventually he abandons her. Angry, the young woman uses the magic
ring of Solomon and wishes for a palace to be built next door to the
Sultan's. She also wishes to be transformed into an even greater beauty,
unrecognizable and irresistible to her former lover. The Sultan's son
is quick to discover his exquisite neighbor and falls in love. He sends
her gifts, which she discards — feeding the gold to her chickens and
using the bolts of fine fabrics as rags. Desperate, the Sultan's son
begs to know how he can prove that he is worthy enough to be her
husband. She tells him that he must wrap himself in a shroud and allow
himself to be buried on the palace grounds and mourned as dead. The
young man agrees and permits his parents to dress him in funeral
clothing and bury him. His mother sits by the grave and mourns his
death. Satisfied, the young woman comes to the palace, retrieves the
Sultan's son from his grave, and reveals her true identity. 'Now I know,' she says, 'that you will go to any length for the
woman you love.'

"What is startling about this old version of Sleeping Beauty is
that the tale is about both of the lovers and both of their journeys of
transformation. Each one experiences a death, an end to their lives as
children. Two sets of parents prepare their children for funerals; two
sets of parents mourn the loss of a beloved child. The Sultan's son is
responsible for awakening Sleeping Beauty, but their subsequent
relationship is not an adult one — it is not sanctioned by the social
bonds of the community.
When she comes to him again, she is changed — transformed by the
fantastic. The Sultan's son, in accepting her condition of marriage, has
also accepted that his privileged life as a child must end. When she
revives him from the dead, they are now equal and their marriage is one
between adults. Who could not admire this Sleeping Beauty? She is a
divine bride sprung from the fantastic, incorruptible in death, able to
call upon magic to perform at her will a clever trick to test her future
husband. He dies and is buried in the earth
and her final act of reviving him only emphasizes her creative
powers and her fertility. He is a Sultan's son but she, confident in her
own power, is equal to him."

In Europe, the oldest known version of the story is "The Sun, the Moon, and Talia," scribed by the Italian writer and coutier Giambattista Basile (c. 1575 - 1632), published posthumously by the author's sister in a collection now known as The Pentamerone. Midori writes:

"In Basile's version (learned from women storytellers in the
countryside near Naples), Sleeping Beauty,
known as Talia, falls into a death–like sleep when a splinter of
flax is embedded under her fingernail. She sleeps alone in a small house
hidden deep within the forest. One day a King goes out hawking and
discovers the sleeping maiden. Finding her beautiful, and unprotesting,
he has sex with her -- while Talia, oblivious to the King's ardent
embraces, sleeps on.
The King leaves the forest, returning not only to his castle but
also to his barren wife. Nine months later a sleeping Talia gives birth
to twins named Sun and Moon. One of the hungry infants, searching for
his mother's breast, suckles her finger and pulls out the flax splinter.
Freed of her curse by the removal of the splinter, Talia wakes up and
discovers her children.

"After a time, the King goes back to the forest and finds Talia
awake, tending to their son and daughter. Delighted, he brings them home
to his estate -- where his barren wife, naturally enough, is bitter and
jealous. As soon as the King is off to battle, the wife orders her cook
to murder Sun and Moon, then prepare them as a feast for her unwitting
husband. The kindhearted cook hides
the children and substitutes goat in a dizzying variety of dishes.
The wife then decides to murder Talia by burning her at the stake. As
Talia undresses, each layer of her fine clothing shrieks out loud (in
other versions, the bells sewn on her seven petticoats jingle).
Eventually the King hears the sound and comes to Talia's rescue. The
jealous wife is put to death, the cook reveals the children's hiding
place,
and the King and Talia are united in a proper marriage.

"Later in the 17th century, a French civil servant named Charles
Perrault wrote his own version of Sleeping Beauty based in part on
Basile's story. Fairy tale scholar Marina Warner (in From the Beast to the Blonde)
notes rather wryly that while rape and adultery were too scandalous for
Perrault, he had no problems with the cannibalism of the Italian
version. Perrault changed the King and his first
wife into a Prince and his dreadful mother: an ogress with a
terrible temper and a fondness for human flesh. Beauty's children are to
be served up in a gourmet sauce, and then Beauty herself is to be
butchered. But the kind
cook fools the ogress, hiding Beauty and her
children and serving a kid, a lamb and a hind in their places. When the
ogress discovers the truth, she becomes enraged and makes plans to throw
them all into a pot of vipers and toads.
Once again the Prince arrives in time to save his lover from harm --
throwing his mother into the pot instead, destroying her .

"These European versions show a shift in emphasis from the older
Arabian narrative. Sleeping Beauty is still the centerpiece of the tale --
but less as an actor and more as an object of power to be acquired,
even at the expense of one's marriage and one's mother. The European tales seem to be focused on the men, not the
slumbering heroine. The need for an heir (first by her father, and then
by the younger King who wakes her) is pivotal here.
Basile spares not a moment of sympathy for the dishonored first
wife of the younger King. Her barrenness defines her as evil, and her
replacement by the fertile magical bride is a triumph. Talia, on the
other hand, is able to give birth even while she lies in the semblance
of death -- making her not quite human but almost a supernatural creature -- and making her impregnation not a crime (the rape it appears to our
modern eyes), but the act through which the King engages with the
fantastic,
simultaneously proving his virility.

"Sleeping Beauty underwent more changes in the mid-19th century when
the Brothers Grimm published their version, "Little Briar Rose," in
fairy tale collections aimed at children and their parents. [The Basile and Perrault stories had been published for adult readers.] While the Grimms retained some
of the dark imagery from the oral storytelling tradition, the sexuality
and bawdy humor of the tales all but disappeared.

"In late-19th century
England, Victorian publishers further sanitized fairy tales, toning down
the violence yet again and simplifying the narratives.
Victorian readers wanted these stories to be charming, to reflect
the gender roles of the time, and above all to instruct proper upper-
and middle-class children in appropriate morality. Innuendo replaced the
overt and troubling activity of carnal sex and violence. . .but as
modern writers from Angela Carter to Marina Warner have pointed out,
these underlying themes are tenacious.

"Looking at the Grimms' version in its original German, folklorist Heinz Insu Fenkl points to
a staccato list of suggestive language: the hedge is 'penetrated,'
Briar Rose is 'pricked,' and she sleeps not in a shrine or a wooded
cottage but enclosed within a phallic tower. And yet on the surface, the
narrative remains almost painfully chaste. The Prince need not even
kiss her to wake her -- he merely bends on one knee beside her bed. Sleeping Beauty is also diminished in other ways in these later, more
'civilized' versions. Earlier variants suggest that the father is the
character most at fault,
bringing the curse down on his daughter through improper dealings
with the fantastic (such as slighting an important fairy). But Victorian
versions seem to suggest the girl is responsible for her own fate,
punished for her disobedience to her father's command not to touch the
spinning wheel. In these versions, it is not only Briar Rose who
suffers, but her parents and the entire court who must sleep for a
hundred years. (One can imagine that to the class-obsessed Victorians, a
privileged daughter handling the tools of the lower classes
provoked alarm, threatening to lower the status of the family.
Briar Rose's sin can only be expiated when a man worthy enough, both in
heart and noble status, redeems her from her transgression -- restoring
both the princess and her family to its former social position.)

"What, then, became of Sleeping Beauty as she
entered the 20th century? And what does the fairy tale mean to us now, in our
post–industrial age? The modern response to the theme
has proven to be as varied as the individual artists drawn to the old
narrative. Sleeping Beauty no longer speaks to a common
identity, a single icon to shape the female image for new generations.
Instead, our Princess finds herself portrayed in many different guises:
as a helpless 1950s stay–at–home girl, a bold space opera heroine, an
oppressed time–traveling queen,
a stoic Holocaust survivor, a sexually abused child, and myriad
others. Her tale ranges in tone from unbearably bright to
psychologically dark and sinister, reflecting modern ambiguity
toward female sexual roles and women's identity."

In her marvellous little book About the Sleeping Beauty, P.L. Travers (folklorist, and author of Mary Poppins) presents several different versions of the princess's story, and reflects on the symbolism of the tale:

"The idea of the sleeper," says Travers, "of somebody hidden from the mortal eye,
waiting until time shall ripen has always been dear to the folky mind; Snow White asleep in her glass coffin, Brynhild behind her wall of
fire, Charlemagne at the heart of France, King Arthur in the Isle of
Avalon, Frederick Barbarossa under his mountain in Thuringia.
Muchukunda, the Hindu King, slept through eons till he was wakened by
the Lord Krishna; Oisin of Ireland dreamed in Tir n'an Og for over three
hundred years. Psyche in her magic sleep is a type of Sleeping Beauty,
Sumerian Ishtar in the underworld may be said to be another. Holga the
Dane is sleeping and waiting, and so, they say, is Sir Francis Drake.
Quetzalcoatl of Mexico and Virochocha of Peru are both sleepers. Morgan
le Fay of France and England and Dame Holle of Germany are sleeping in
raths and cairns. The theme of the sleeper is as old as the memory of
man....

"[I]f the fairy tale characters are our prototypes -- which is what
they are designed to be -- we must come to the point where we are forced
to relate the stories and their meanings to ourselves. No amount of
rationalizing will bring us to the heart of the fairy tale. To enter it
one must be prepared to let rational reason go. The stories have to be
loved for themselves before they will release their secrets. So, face
to face with the Sleeping Beauty...we find ourselves compelled to ask:
what is it in us that at certain moments suddenly falls asleep?
Who lies hidden deep within us? And who will come to wake us, what
aspect of ourselves?

"Are we dealing here with the sleeping soul and all the external affairs of life that hem it in and hide it; something that falls asleep after childhood, something that not to waken would make life meaningless? To give an answer, supposing we had it, would be breaking the law of fairy tale. And perhaps no answer is necessary. It is enough that we ponder upon and love the story and ask ourselves the question."

"We sleep," says David Abram (in Becoming Animal), "allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth -- our larger body --
to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking
hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them
back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give
ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the
shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our
limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves
that compose it -- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime
directives now from gravity and the wind -- as residual bits of sunlight,
caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of
our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys."

"She knew no greater
pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her
limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids
became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings
and talons and became other than conscious." - John Crowley (Little, Big)

"We don’t sleep to sleep, dammit, any more than we eat to eat. We sleep
to dream. We’re amphibians. We live in two elements and we need both." - Lindsay Clarke (The Chymical Wedding)

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Below, three juicy excerpts from "Fairy Stories," an essay by A.S. Byatt (first published as the introduction to her
story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye):

"Fairy stories are related to dreams, which are maybe most people's first experience of unreal
narrative, and to myths. Realism is related to explanations and
orderings -- the tale of the man in the bar who tells you the story of
his life, the historian who explains the decisions of generals and the
decline of economies. Great novels, I believe, always draw on both ways
of telling, both ways of seeing. But because realism is agnostic and sceptical, human and reasonable, I have always felt it was what I ought
to do. And yet my impulse to write came, and I know it, from years of
reading myths and fairytales under the bedclothes, from the delights and
freedoms and terrors of worlds and creatures that never existed."

"There has recently been a great variety of interest in fairy stories.
The early psychoanalysts studied their relations to dreams and the
unconscious, and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment
provides one description of the use of these stories in a culture -- a
description which is both exciting and limited. It is clear that an
explanation of The Sleeping Beauty in terms of the adolescent
girl's characteristic pre-sexual torpor is inspired and to the point -- but it isn't adequate, it doesn't do away with the enchantment of the
thicket of roses, or even the mystery of the bead of blood on the
pricked finger. Marina Warner has recently pointed out that the figure
of the usurping stepmother was dreadfully real in medieval and Renaissance societies, where so many women died in childbirth, leaving
children, but that does not explain away our terror of the hostile
parent, or
the witch. Modern feminists have used the 'irrationality' of
fairy tales to explore female desires and dreams; they have also
rewritten narratives to provide powerful heroines, sometimes arguing
that all women in the original fairy tales were meek victims, which is
simply not true. There are plenty of resourceful princesses and peasants
and goddesses -- that is one of the pleasures of the other world. Salman
Rushdie and others have used the fairy tale both to give an edge of
satiric licence to a picture of particular societies, and to play with
reality and fantasy as all societies have always done. The literary
fairy tale is a wonderful, versatile hybrid form, which draws on
primitive apprehensions and narrative motifs, and then uses them to
think consciously about human beings and the world. Both German Romantic
fairy tales and the self-conscious playful courtly stories of
seventeenth-century French ladies, combine the new thought of the time with the ancient tug of forest and castle, demon and witch, vanishing and shape-shifting, loss and restoration."

" 'Never trust the teller, trust the tale,' said D.H.Lawrence, in a
phrase which has been remembered because it accords with readers'
deepest instincts. What I have always believed is that the human
imagination, given any scene, any two people, any danger, any love, any
fear, will start elaborating, inhabiting, touching, tasting, feeling.
Fairy stories rely most simply and most powerfully on the imaginations
of readers and hearers, who create and recreate worlds, old and known in
part, new and unknown in part. Professional storytellers in Britain, a
thriving profession, believe the oral is more powerful than the written,
in this regard, and believe also that all great storytelling must
retell old and shared stories, the tales of Grimm and the epic of
Gilgamesh, that the new, individual insights of the literary fairytale
do not have the power or the common wisdom to compel our assent. I don't
believe that myself -- but I do believe that it is what is old in the new
that compels assent for the new -- that the Forest and the Dragon call up
worlds in which we can think about our own histories and life-stories.
Making up worlds is as natural and as necessary to human beings as
breathing and sleeping."

Monday, September 09, 2013

Today's tunes are from the British folk duo Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, a classically trained vocalist and guitarist who infuse their mix of original, classic, and traditional songs with exquisite musicianship. Their lovely new CD, "Fire and Fortune," just came out in July.

Above: "Who Knows Where the Time Goes," the bitter-sweet folk anthem penned by the late, great Sandy Denny (recorded by Denny and Fairport Convention in '69) -- which seems suitable for a cold, misty morning here in Devon, as summer transitions rather abruptly into autumn.

Myth & Moor

by Terri Windling

I'm a writer, artist, and book editor interested in myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the ways they are used in contemporary arts. I workin the New York publishing industry but I live in alittle village at the edgeof Dartmoor in Devon, England, with my husband, dramatist Howard Gayton, our daughter, Victoria Windling-Gayton, and a dog named Tilly. If you'd like to know more, my publishing bio is here, and my website is here.

“There are some people who live in a dream world,” said Douglas Everett, “and some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

I want to be the latter.

About this blog:

Myth & Moor is a daily journal for musings about art, myth, books, village life, and the world-wide community of folks who create and love Mythic Arts.

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth...the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times." - Gary Snyder

"People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand - what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for - Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.” - Terry Tempest Williams

"This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories." - Ben Okri

"Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion." - Barry Lopez

Bookshelf

The Wood Wife:A mythic novel set in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. This link goes to the US edition; a UK edition is available here; and the new French edition is here. (For those who might be interested, I did a Q-&-A session on the book over on the Good Reads site.) Winner of the Mythopoeic Award.

Welcome to Bordertown:The latest volume in a classic Urban Fantasy series for YA readers. (An Audie Award nominee, for the audio book edition.) For information on the previous books, visit the Bordertown website.)

All told, I've published over forty books for children, teenagers and adults. More information on my writing, editing, and art can be found on my website.

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Please note that these books are linked to Amazon because it's the only book linking system that Typepad (this blogging service) has,but I urge you to please support your local bookstore if you plan to purchase any of the books mentioned on this blog.

Links to:

The Endicott StudioThe nonprofit organization for Mythic Arts that I ran for 22 years (starting in 1986), co-directed with author & folklorist Midori Snyder. The organization is currently on hiatus (while we catch our breaths and make a living), but a great deal of material from our Journal of Mythic Arts archive remains online.

Interstitial ArtsEllen Kushner, Delia Sherman, & other good folk look at writing and art in the interstices between genres. I was one of the founding board members, and remain an enthusiastic supporter.

Brain PickingsI have no connection whatsoever with this inspiring blog by Maria Popova. I list it here because it's my favorite site on the Web, and deserves to be widely known.